The present invention relates to a traffic simulation technique. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method, program, and system for simulating vehicles traveling on a road.
There are known computer-based traffic simulation systems. Such systems cause a computer to calculate the movement of each vehicle along a road at each time step and proceed to process the information. For example, according to JP2004258889A, the direction and magnitude of acceleration of a vehicle, in both the case of stopping and the case of traveling, are determined based on both a static potential field (defined by the magnitude of effects of external factors that affect the traveling of the vehicle and are temporally constant) and a dynamic potential field (defined by the magnitude of effects of external factors that affect the traveling of the vehicle and temporally vary). In this case, the width of the time step causes a problem. That is, in order to increase the accuracy of a simulation, the width of the time step must be reduced. This reduction reduces the operation velocity of the simulation system.
In another example, JP200993425A discloses a traffic flow simulation in order to improve the processing efficiency while securing a required accuracy. JP200993425A discloses a traffic flow simulation where a region as an object of the simulation is divided into a plurality of regions and different values of the time steps are assigned to the respective regions. In this case if, after a time step, a moving vehicle enters a region with a different time step, the time and the position at this time (which are in conformity with the time step for the region in which the vehicle enters) are calculated and the simulation is continued. The technique in JP200993425A requires both that the region as an object of the simulation is preliminarily divided and that appropriate values of the time steps are assigned to the respective divided regions. However, it is difficult to set an appropriate value of the time step to any object region.